#kathare

Hi anon! Thanks so much for asking, I truly did not think anyone would be interested! ;-; My AO3 is Fawn_blooms! Link below!

Okay, so! EOTA (Echoes of the Achaeans). Let me explain….

I wrote a fic where the girls know exactly how it ends. Like… Every death. Every name. Every day of the war, in order. It doesn’t help them.

That’s the whole thing: foreknowledge as weight, not power. You can see it coming from miles away, and you still have to stand in your doorframe and watch it walk past. The Iliad does not care that you’ve read it. It will happen to you anyway.

The Korē Four (yeah, it’s a pun):

Elaía is the one everybody orients toward. She’s warm, steady, and the emotional anchor. The person who holds the room together without being asked. She has been doing this her whole life, and nobody has ever thought to hold the room for her. She is about to have a very bad time in a very specific way, and she could see it coming and walked toward it anyway. (She read the Iliad and thought it would protect her… she was so wrong, lmao, and I love her)

Maria runs on logic and performance and has been performing for so long she’s not entirely sure what’s underneath it. She is very good at reading people. She is very bad at letting people read her. (Camp is going to fix that for her. She did not ask for this service)

Pedía doesn’t show you what she’s feeling. Ever. Her face is a closed door, and she moves through the world with the efficient stillness of someone who learned early that visible emotion is a liability. She is also, quietly, the most perceptive person in any room she’s in. She just never tells you what she noticed. Not unless you know how to ask. (Few actually know how to ask.)

Katharē knows the most. She has known since before they arrived. She has been carrying the full weight of how this ends since chapter one, and she will carry it until the last page, and she will not put it down because there is nowhere to put it. She is doing great. She is normal and fine about this. (She is struggling, lol)

They’ve been friends long enough to have shorthand. Long enough that a look across a room means something. Long enough to know exactly which one is going to say the thing nobody else will, which one is going to act like she didn’t hear it, and which one clocked everything ten minutes ago and decided it wasn’t her problem.

Troy takes all of that and puts four walls around it. Separate walls!! And that’s the point!! Bc the shorthand only works when you’re in the same room… They’re on opposite ends of a military camp, and the rules of this world mean that reaching each other costs something every time.

So they learn to read each other in fragments. A look held a bit too long, the set of a shoulder, what someone doesn’t say when she normally would have. They become experts in the negative space of each other.

Which would be impressive if it were enough ( It isn’t enough)

Why the Bronze Age specifically:

Because it is a world with no structural place for them. They are too tall, too direct, too soft-handed. Just unmarked in ways that read as inhuman. They walk behind their guardians and speak only when addressed. They cover their hair and do not make eye contact, because eye contact could read as immodest or divine. They are tolerated under a framework that could revoke that tolerance at any time. It’s fine. No really. Everything is fine.

Also! The assignments are not accidental.

Odysseus and Elaía: a man who controls what every room believes, and a woman who has spent her whole life intuitively doing the same thing without knowing it. (The most frustrating slow burn you’ve ever read because neither of them is wrong, and it still costs everything.)

Menelaus and Maria: a man who has never performed a single thing in nine years of war, and a woman who has been performing since before she can remember. (Two people who are both terrible at being perceived. Troy really said, “Let’s fix that.”)

Ajax and Pedía: the biggest, most certain presence in the camp, and the girl who has never once let anyone see her need anything. (You’ll have to stay tuned on this one. Their dynamic is my favorite, and also it’s going to destroy you.)

Diomedes and Katharē: two people who wanted a peer, more specifically, a like mind. They found one and broke anyway. (I’m normal about this. She definitely will not break his heart)

Four dynamics. Four different fractures.

Four women in four separate huts, unable to reach each other, the war running exactly as written, with them in the margins of it, unable to spend what they know on anything that matters!!!!

And then it ends the way the war ends: fires and running blood.

Then Hermes comes to each of them alone on those dark ships and says something that might be a promise. Whether it’s a promise of home or of further suffering is yet to be known to the reader. Hehehe!

I’ve been writing this for months, and I still don’t know how to explain what it does to me!!!

Echoes of the Achaeans — Chapters 1–14 posted: Here

She knows exactly what she thinks and sees no reason to soften it. Observant in a way that feels almost unfair…. she has you figured out before you’ve decided how to present yourself. Keeps most people at a comfortable distance and is completely unbothered by that. Her intensity is not incidental, she knows.

What lives underneath is real and deep and almost nobody gets there. She lets very few people in, and the ones she does let in get everything. Until then, you get the blunt version. Consider yourself lucky she’s talking to you at all.

Now if you’re deemed worthy…. Expect to be loved so fiercely that it’ll rearrange something in you.

Hatergirl no.1